Peoples Attitudes changed when stated I was joining

[Strike]

Wow, waiting for some teachers to get on here and throw a few back at you...

 

[warspite]

i've got a ways to go yet but my dad supports me, my mom worries but just wants whats best, my freinds support me and my general family ranges from you want to what?? to good foryou

 

[ClaytonD]

I think you give them too much credit.

It always amazes me that students put so much stock in what teachers and guidance councillors say outside of their classroom areas of expertise.

Education is universally regarded as one of the extremely "easy" degrees to get, and a ticket to a safe union job where your aptitude can only ever be measured by your experience.

Yet young people place unlimited stock in what these people say in regards to future career choices and pruded courses of education, training and work.

Listen to your teachers when they teach you something, but when they talk about the "real world" just nod and smile.

I don't think that is fair to most teachers to be honest. Just like any job, there are good teachers and bad teachers but, (Now I don't have a bastion of experience in the "real world") I know counsellors/teachers who have spent careers in the military, and teachers that have done tons of things in the 'real world' before becoming teachers.  Now don't get me wrong, some teachers are dolts, but I think I have to disagree on the 'nodding and smiling' part. Because some teachers DO know what they're talking about. Sometimes when they are talking about the real world they actually ARE teaching you something. Should you nod and smile then?

Some teachers will be biased, and some will be ignorant and misinformed, but that just shows a bad teacher who well... Shouldn't be teaching. Personally I think teaching is one of the most respectable jobs in the country right now, along with the military, and if they are giving you ignorant misinformed information about the real world, well then, they aren't really teachers.

Sorry if this doesn't make alot of sense I am kind of rambling.  :-\

 

[patrick666]

The first thing people say when I say I am joining is, "But you'll be sent to Afghanistan and you'll probably be killed".

I don't understand why people always focus on the negative. The only people who see it as an amazing opportunity to advance my skills, strength and knowledge are my family who support me one hundred percent.

You live once, do what YOU want.

 

[paracowboy]

The first thing people say when I say I am joining is, "But you'll be sent to Afghanistan and you'll probably be killed".

tell 'em "Better than Afghanistan coming here, and YOU being killed."

Then punch them in throat.

 

[big bad john]

tell 'em "Better than Afghanistan coming here, and YOU being killed."

Then punch them in throat.

Getting mild in your old age +1

 

[Collin.t]

Don't blame the population, blame the mass media, they are the ones mainly responsible of giving a bad rep to the canadian forces on pretty much every aspects.

 

[Hockeycaper]

tell 'em "Better than Afghanistan coming here, and YOU being killed."

Then punch them in throat.

Great response, but you now owe me a new coffee... and a new monitor.... ;D

 

[spud]

tell 'em "Better than Afghanistan coming here, and YOU being killed."

Then punch them in throat.

Thank you, that's the funniest thing I have read in a long time!!

 

[Cayuga]

Peoples attitudes were one of the most interesting aspect of joining the forces. There was a range of responses and ignorance was a factor on all parts of the spectrum of responses. I was in the last year of University, looking for a job and the Navy was always something that I was interested in, but I was a bit of a nerdy kid in high school so I had discounted it as a career. However after 5 years of university and a load of growing up, I knew it was the job for me.

My Dad was a little surprised, but he was supportive of me in whatever I did. He wanted me to do something with my life and something that I could be proud of. I think for him it was a bit of a surprise that his son was going in the military. It was confirmation that he had done a good job raising me because I was choosing something more than living in a cubicle and to give something to society.

My Mum was pleased that her son was going to be an Officer and that I would look very handsome in my uniform. She was less surprised than my dad was.

My older sister reaction was "WHAT!!! .... .... hmm... i can see you doing that..." It was in Church before the service so there were a heads turning and all... kinda funny. Her husband was very supportive also.
My 2nd older sister was scared that I was going to get myself killed. Her husband wanted to know what cool stuff I would get to do and what the pay was like.

Jr. High and High School friends who I ran into were really surprised. I was on their least likely to join the military list. One of my high school buddies who always talked about joining the air force and flying jets who now has some boring dead end job was rather jealous since I had gone and done what he had only dreamt about. My best friend was like "well you have only wanted to do that for as long as I have known you".

My boss used to be armored and while he thought I was crazy for wanting to go Navy, he was really pumped and he really wanted to be one of my references.

The general other responses were "We have a navy?", " Doesn't West Ed Mall have more submarines than the navy?", "MARS officer, We have a space program?", "You'll never make any money doing that", "Navy eh? That is cool. I thought about going _____ once", "I would join, but I have a family" "So you're going to command a zodiak?", "So are you going to get posted to an aircraft carrier?", "Wow... er Yes,sir, do I have to salute you now?" - followed by some attempt at a salute, " 20 vacation days a year? I have been at the company X years and I just got 3 weeks...", "So when do they make you admiral?", "Why would you want to do THAT?"

Now that I am in, one of the most common lines I hear is "So tell me what you did, so I can live vicariously through you". Most often from people who are 30 something stuck in a job with a really low excitement factor.

I remember at basic, my friends were having a contest about who had done the coolest thing recently... when I said... "I got gassed this morning and fired a rifle this afternoon, including on full automatic..." They were all like "You Win"...

I love my job, even when things suck, I take a step back and think of other things that I could be doing and they are nowhere as cool nor have the 'I get paid to do this' factor

 

[patrick666]

paracowboy - What a perfect response - of course, perfectly puncuated by assaulting their throat. =) 

I think it would be semi-humourous to see dozens of 'terrorists' swimming across the Atlantic in suicide-canoes.

Anyways, back to the thread.

 

[bcbarman]

Love this thread.

This is a bit of a biased forum for this topic, but one that I support wholeheartedly.

I'll use the quote that I shouted at my platoon when I taught basic last summer:

"your friends are out doing construction, working at McDonald's this summer; you are shooting machine guns, making great friends and learning skills that will use the rest of your life, and Getting paid for it!  How can you not love the army?"

Join, if its not for you, 3 years out of your life is nothing.  I do laugh a those that join the infantry, but laughing at the infantry is something that the calvary has been doing for centuries.

Go armour.

 

[doomwolf]

I tell people I'm in the Army Reserves and they often go "Is that Cadets?"  I then explain that it's the same idea of the National Guard except we can only go overseas if we volunteer. I haven't had anyone tell me it's a bad idea, I just get a lot of indifference. My parents (esp my mother) are very supportive though, and I'm in the same unit my grandfather was in during WWII, so that comes up whenever we talk.

Still not sure about doing any tours/going reforce, but I'll get my 3's and a couple years of university under my belt before I worry too much.

 

[keaner]

Just to put a different spin on this thread, I've been out of the Regs for going on 5 yrs and now am looking at getting back into the Reserves. I'm doing it for all the good things you have all mentioned - which, I can tell you - simply aren't out on civvie street.
- I'm bored silly.
- Most civvy businesses don't have a sense of urgency (I use that phrase with my subordinates and they look at me funny).
- I used to look forward to my next day at work.
- I spent zero time playing office politics.
- Troops didn't spend all their energy trying to not work while at work.
What the military did give me was the knowledge and confidence to land a Plant Superintendent position after only 3 years as a civvy. Hopefully, I can get the best of both worlds.
The only thing the wife asked when I told her I was geting back in was, "Do you have to go to Afghanistan?" A pretty normal wife worry, I think.

 

[Strike]

I do laugh a those that join the infantry, but laughing at the infantry is something that the calvary has been doing for centuries.

bcbarman, I do believe that you mean cavalry, as opposed to calvary, which has an entirely different meaning.

 

[Zell_Dietrich]

.... well If you were where you know who got you know what..... I'd be fairly smug too.  Well not as smug as some of the cavalry guys I know.... but ...

(You know I'm kidding,  I'd never... publicly ... imply that I know any cavalry guys) ;D

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03191a.htm

 

[George Wallace]

bcbarman, I do believe that you mean cavalry, as opposed to calvary, which has an entirely different meaning.

I guess that is his cross to bear.

 

[bcbarman]

You are correct sir, I hate spell check some days

[Putting my hand out to get slapped for not saying what I want clearly]

 

[Old Sweat]

George,

If no one else is going to groan at your outrageous pun, than I shall.

 

[paracowboy]

I was reading some stuff on comic books (did you guys realize that they‘re like 5 bucks a damn comic now? $5! I can remember buying mine for a quarter! And the stuff in them! Freakin‘ soft-core porn! Anyway…), and I found this amusing article.
http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/niven/142/recycleb/rb37.html

Amusing because, with some minor tweaking, it applies so well here. And thus, with minor tweaking included, I present it to you:

Anti-military types are a particularly repulsive lot. Though inclined by some bizarre delusory self-congratulation to cast themselves as "hippies" (whatever that’s supposed to mean thirty years after the Summer of Love), they’re even worse hypocrites than their predecessors. At least the fools in bell-bottoms had the excuse that nobody had tried this particular tack before, and that they were all whacked out on acid. These fools have no such excuse. We know that the idiocy spawned in 1968, from Flower Power to drug abuse, is just that - idiocy, and cannot work.

But, they cannot allow themselves to see that. They HAVE to try to claim some sort of moral high ground, since their ridiculous assertions on ANY subject cannot function in reality. So, devoid of a moral compass, they seek to claim moral superiority. By shouting loud enough, they hope to sway others.

They seem to divide the world into irreconcilable camps of those whom they think will stroke their own ego, buying into their attempts at emotional blackmail, and those whom they see as fundamentally incomplete in that they forgot to dress in the appropriate SS uniforms. The sad irony is that these despicable twits are the single most close-minded and totalitarian dictators today. Anyone who disagrees with any part of their Manifesto is immediately vilified and shouted down with screams of outrage. They use some odd form of guilt as their primary weapon, which they employ by screeching blatant falsehoods at such volume that they hope to drown facts out.

While the unexamined life might represent something of dubious value, how should we value a life from which all virtues, values, principals, and icons of substance have fled, driven under a blistering cynicism that has moved to the next logical phase - nihilism?

To the extent that these neuveaux-hippies stand in all the right post-modern poses, wear the oh-so-hip fashions, and affect the insufferably suave sneer doubtless born from many, many hours practicing in front of a mirror in order to appear unselfconscious, we may observe that, in spite all of their protestations about the phoniness of the soldier and his ilk, they live for a pose and an image. They may impugn the soldier for the silliness of following the conventions of a forties-model movie hero, but this attack dishonestly attempts to deride us for posturing rather than for striking an unhip posture.

Although their rhetoric-filled propaganda seem more like training films for a kind of Nazi torch-lit rally, and their program reflects a kind of self-assured semi-fascism, they characterize themselves as "hippies." They base this, it would seem, more on superficial things - perhaps a tendency to dabble in sex and intoxicants, to dress a certain way, and a desire to attach themselves to a borrowed hipness through claiming membership in a body that has a considerable image credential that belies its' original diversity. However, the methods of the far-left loonies implicate them not as the kind of folk who eschew the rat race and decide to spend their life selling friendship bracelets at folk art fairs, but instead of the principal figures in conspiracy theories. These clowns are all about appearance, not substance.

And, somehow, they manage to misidentify the "bad guys" on a sociopolitical axis by incredibly superficial traits, like the tendency to wear suits or the tendency to vote for politicians that their own incredibly hip cynical worldviews would never allow them to consider (indeed, the notion of something so bourgeois as voting must send their kind into uncontrolled spasms of laughter). In essence, they use style as a mask for a polluted substance.

In some ways, the culture of the west has allowed a great deal of latitude to those who mouth the appropriate slogans rather than those who practice exemplary principles or lead exemplary lives. Probably we could consider this a consequence of indulging a tendency to self-serving distortion, where wishful thinking inclines us to believe that we can assume a moral high ground without actually doing any work or making sacrifices. We could also consider this a consequence of a pandemic kind of political dogmatism which arbitrarily assigns people a role as "good guys" or "bad guys" based on trivia, then declares as "moral" those folks who repeat the correct political sound bytes at the proper stimuli.

Thus, without irony, granola-munchers can condemn a soldier as some kind of dupe, stooge, puppet, or punk of the vast right-wing military industrial complex conspiracy (the more qualifiers you string on, the less the term seems to mean) even as he practices precisely the vices critics of just such a nebulous body accuse them of. Wanton violence, shameless self-promotion, tremendous arrogation to self of a completely unwarranted moral authority, contempt for the weak, a vacuity of compassion for one's fellow man - one sees more of this in the college-level Leftist activist than the average war criminal drawn from the establishment military.

However, since hippy-boy wears the right clothes, strikes the aloof and ironic poses, and recites American atrocities (real and imagined) on cue, we can see how he places himself among the good guys. Image means all here. Take a Lieutenant Calley - the infamous architect of the My Lai massacre - and we easily recognize him as monstrous, based on his deeds; but to assign a similar moral disopprobrium to someone who wears the right clothes, reflects the right tastes, and comes from a hipper country requires more insight, since his ornamentation has yet to fall into the same kind of disrepute as the garments of a soldier who mistakes his uniform for a kind of ethical blank check.

The second half of the twentieth century could, if one chose to observe it closely, serve as a textbook about the origins, development, and ultimate dead end represented by cynicism. Cynicism either meets frontiers it dare not cross - such as non-negotiable moral underpinnings or deeply-seated taboos that even a rather vehement version of the product dare not cross - or it continues to engulf the whole of a world-view, spawning descendant tendencies like nihilism.

On the other hand, cynicism can resolve itself much the same way that Dante's hell resolved. One can enter it, move through it, and come out the other side after cynicism becomes truly all-encompassing. Many cynics never reach the final sacred cow that this kind of ill-will disguised as world-weary wisdom generally fears to confront. Yet cynicism, taken to its logical conclusion, stops believing in itself, as cynicism disillusions about cynicism itself.

To some extent, portions of western culture have entered a period that much represents this process of abandonment of snide contempt for the ordinary, elitism disguised as skepticism, and irony as a fashion statement. So we might, with some stretch (and perhaps optimism) characterize the present or near future as the Post-Ironical Age, and see in this story something like Mahomet battering down the ironic idols of the generation that came before.